Second Nature / Inhumane Geographies / Artist Bios

ZHANG KECHUN (BORN IN BAZHONG, SICHUAN PROVINCE, CHINA, 1980) uses a large-format camera to explore the postindustrial Chinese landscape and its lasting significance to Chinese identity and culture. He showcases nature’s magnificence with a gentle color palette, granting a ghostly beauty to an ecology marred by modernization. His powerfully atmospheric imagery serves as a meditation on both the tragic effects of industrialization and the absurd mundanity of people’s everyday lives within this context. His first series, The Yellow River, examines the effects of modernization on one of Asia’s longest rivers, and his second series, Between the Mountains and Water, further dives into the relationship between contemporary Chinese people and the land on which they live and work. Kechun’s practice implies a certain trepidation for the speed at which urbanization and human development are setting us down an unsettling trajectory of environmental devastation.

PABLO LÓPEZ LUZ (BORN IN MEXICO CITY, MEXICO, 1979) is inspired by the rich artistic and architectural history of Mexico, the tradition of landscape painting, and photographers such as Graciela Iturbide and Lewis Baltz. His photographs of both natural and urban landscapes around Mexico City and broader Latin America often explore historical references in the contemporary world—especially in relation to the evolution of Mexican national identity. Luz is fascinated by the ways in which landscapes can reveal “the nature of people themselves,” even without the literal presence of human figures. His body of work reflects an obsession with the expansiveness of land as viewed from above and the awe-in- spiring beauty of nature. His images of urban landscapes shot from a deliberately disorienting perspective depict an eerily dystopian sprawl of constructed homes and buildings that force us to reckon with the chaos of our constantly transforming geographies.

MOUNA KARRAY (BORN IN SFAX, TUNISIA, 1970) creates photography and video projects in the space between the intimate and public spheres. She is interested in universal questions around identity, borders, confinement, and forgot- ten terrains. Her deep observation of surrounding environments often turns her gaze toward the margins and leads her to scrutinize human memory. She writes, “I summon up the unnamed oppressed, absent or lost people from different angles—all those familiar strangers who, under duress or out of injustice, express resistance, the possibility of the creation and the hope for salvation.” Karray’s series Nobody Will Talk about Us (2012–15) pictures individuals wrapped like luggage, bound with rope and photographed in southwestern Tunisia. This work conveys the odd confluence of near invisibility and the political and social isolation of communities that have been increasingly subject to resource extraction in the colonial and postcolonial era.

SZE TSUNG NICOLÁS LEONG (BORN IN MEXICO CITY, MEXICO, 1970) is a British Mexican American artist, born in Mexico City and currently based in Los Angeles. Using film and developing his prints in a darkroom, Leong travels the world photographing cities and their outskirts. Leong’s detailed medium- and large-scale color photographs present a vision of the shifting and varied topography of the contemporary world. He has long been interested in changes to the urban fabric and their socioeconomic implications, and thus his images contain both traces of the past and implications of its future. His series History Images (2002) documents the destruction of ancient Chinese dwellings in favor of modern skyscrapers. Cities, Leong maintains, are the “most enduring, and most encompassing, documents of history.”

DHRUV MALHOTRA (BORN IN JAIPUR, INDIA, 1985) grew up in Jaipur, the capital of Rajasthan, the desert state of India. After studying economics and working at a financial consultancy, Malhotra became disillusioned with finance and eventually transitioned to photography. Struggling with insomnia, he took advantage of these sleepless nights by wandering the streets of the rapidly developing region of Noida, outside New Delhi, photographing the city at night. He has written of the night’s “powerful appeal” to him, explaining, “The silence, the palpable sense of time and the unknown draws me to photograph.” He is drawn to empty spaces around the city’s periphery, “on the edges of urbanity, inhabiting a borderland of sorts, null spaces that are almost invisible.” By showcasing forgotten urban landscapes in the dead of night, Malhotra reveals unsettling, dystopian crevices of a culture in the throes of modernity and incessant progress.

WILL WILSON (DINÉ/NAVAJO, BORN IN SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, 1969) is a Diné photographer who spent his formative years living in the Navajo Nation. Wilson studied photography, sculpture, and art history at the University of New Mexico, where he received his master’s degree in fine arts. He harnesses new and old technologies to transform contemporary photography and explore Indigenous relationships to the land in unprecedented ways. His ongoing series Auto Immune Response (AIR) focuses on the dynamics between a postapocalyptic Diné man and the toxicity of the environment he calls home. In imagining the future of Diné people, Wilson also examines a history of incredibly rapid evolution of Indigenous ways of life. Wilson deploys numerous photographic techniques, digital manipulations, performance, and installations to give voice to Indigenous peoples reckoning with environmental catastrophe and the repercussions on their cultural survival.

ANDREW ESIEBO (BORN IN LAGOS, NIGERIA, 1978) is an award-winning visual storyteller who began chronicling the rapid development of urban Nigeria along with the country’s rich culture and heritage. As his career progressed, he explored new creative territory, integrating multimedia practice with the investigation of themes such as sexuality, popular culture, migration, religion, and spirituality. Esiebo’s work serves as a record of the physical layering of the urban environment as the city is transformed by repeated natural resource extraction and transport out of Nigeria. Through a range of portraiture and landscape photography, he suggests the unique dehumanization that accompanies the twenty-first century megalopolis as well as the resulting disconnect from traditional expectations of “natural” landscapes.

ANASTASIA SAMOYLOVA (BORN IN MOSCOW, RUSSIA, 1984) is an American artist who splits her time between New York and Miami, Florida. Her practice is a combination of observational photography, studio practice, and installation. She utilizes tools and strategies related to commercial and digital media to explore environmentalism, consumerism, and the picturesque. In 2017, Hurricane Irma inspired Samoylova to document her new, tropical home in Miami and its rising sea levels in a collection of work titled FloodZone. Unlike more conventional disaster photography, the series depicts a complex push and pull between the city’s invasion of the surrounding Everglades and nature’s attempt at reclamation. Her disorienting allusions to the slow catastrophe of climate change emphasize the fleeting liminality between the familiarity of our landscapes and their future as an unreachable and nostalgic past.

GIDEON MENDEL (BORN IN JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA, 1959) has developed a uniquely intimate style of stills and videography over the course of his more than forty-year career. He first earned acclaim for his work as a “struggle photographer,” documenting the conflict in South Africa during the final years of apartheid. Since then, his practice has revealed a dedicated response to the crucial global issues facing his generation. Mendel began his Drowning World series in 2007 to document flood zones and the humans impacted by such overwhelming climate events around the world. In his Submerged Portraits, subjects look out at us from their inundated homes not as disempowered victims, but with agency even amid devastation. Through these portraits, some of the poorest and wealthiest communities in the world are united by a shared experience of climate catastrophe that transcends geographic, cultural, and economic divides.

RICHARD MOSSE (BORN IN KILKENNY, IRELAND, 1980) incorporates military-grade technology in his photographic practice, hoping to reveal the ways in which governments surveil and represent their subjects. Using infrared film, Mosse’s Infra series consists of vibrant pink photos that aestheticize the complex conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, while his Heat Maps depict what appear to be glowing silver images of migrants and refugees, the effects of the thermal-imaging camera rendering them anonymous. He has a keen eye for beauty in tragedy; thus, issues of othering, intrusion, and dehumanization have continually been at the forefront of his work. At a time when increased migration is caused by climate change and political conflict, all of which will continue to be exacerbated by the Anthropocene, Mosse’s work contributes to the long-standing debate about how photographers can and should respond to humanitarian crises.

SANNE DE WILDE (BORN IN ANTWERP, BELGIUM, 1987) uses photography to explore the role that genetics, identity, and perception play in people’s lives. She is especially interested in how these components can be both an impetus for community-building and a cause of vulnerability and othering. In her photo series The Island of the Colorblind, she portrays the islanders of Pingelap, a small Micronesian atoll that is home to the highest concentration of achromatopsia, more commonly known as color blindness. In the late eighteenth century, a typhoon destroyed much of Pingelap, with one of the only survivors being the king, who carried and passed down the rare achromatopsia gene. De Wilde’s series consists of digital images that invite the viewer to enter a fantastical world of vibrant color. She converts some photos to black and white, creates photo paintings in collaboration with the islanders, and uses infrared imagery to encourage viewers to rethink their own perceptions of color and contemplate the genetic consequences of natural disaster.

Artist bios credit: Claire L. Hutchinson, Duke University class of ’22